The Ledbetter children all grew up in a time when the facts of life were never talked about, but the older girls soon figured out one thing for themselves. When a new baby was about to be added to the family, their mother would get out a box of baby clothes and sit that box at the top of the stairs. Every time the box appeared, the girls knew it wouldn’t be long until a new baby arrived. Only one of the nine children was born at the hospital, and that was David, the youngest. All of the other eight were born at home.

The first doll Dalphine had was a gift from Addison Bilbrey’s mother, a lady everyone called Ma Bilbrey. The doll was placed on a neighbors’ Christmas tree and tied with a big red ribbon. When Dalphine started to school, she rode a truck type school bus that had two wooden benches in the back. Dalphine remembers one of the first times she rode the bus, her mother walked with her to the road to wait till the bus came along, and when she got on, there was no place to sit, other than in Terry Mitchell’s lap. That’s how she got to school that day.

In the summer months, the Ledbetter family had lots of company to come visiting. Jewell cooked huge meals for these special times. Aunts, uncles, and cousins would come and bring watermelons and sometimes ice to make home made ice cream. Some of their cousins, Betty and Bertha Hawkins, Joan and Billy Ledbetter, and a close friend, Johnnie Vaughn, were all like part of their family. Sunday afternoons would often be spent walking in the woods looking for hickory nuts. When cousins and friends spent the night at the Ledbetter house, the beds would all be full, some sleeping crossways in the bed, and sometimes on pallets on the floor.

Lorene was involved in a terrible accident when she was young. She was working for their neighbors, Albert Mitchell and wife Maude, and one day while doing some house cleaning for them, Maude Mitchell handed Lorene a cigar box to put in the wood stove to burn. Neither one had any idea that the cigar box contained gun powder until it exploded. Lorene was badly burned and spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from the burns. She still today carries the scars of that terrible accident.

The family owned a battery operated radio, but it was not listened to unless it was on a Saturday night. Friends and neighbors would gather at the Ledbetter house that night to sit around the radio and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. The kids would sing and dance on the nights they listened to the radio and really gave the floor in their house a good workout from all the dancing. Singing was something all the girls loved to do, and they often sang together as they did housework or any other chores each day. In fact, their dad thought the whole family was good enough that he should have taken them to Nashville to see if they might have been able to sing professionally. In his later years of life, he told Sue he regretted not doing this.

With a family of nine children, there was always a big washing to do, and for many years, that task took place on a rub board and an iron kettle out in the yard. On wash day, the clotheslines and the fence row would be hanging full of wet clothes. Later, Dalphine bought the first washing machine her mother had. All the Ledbetter kids knew their beds had to be made every day before they left for school, and the girls were taught to do a really thorough job when it came to cleaning the house. The floors were scrubbed with lye soap and then waxed. Their method for polishing the floors after they had been waxed was to pull each other around the floor on an old rug. Even their front yard was swept every Saturday morning. Anytime company was expected, the house was given a really good scrubbing, not just the floors but the walls as well, and even the out house wasn’t left out. It was scrubbed throughly too, and a new Sears and Roebuck catalogue would be placed there especially for their guests. Patricia remembers how grand she thought their Aunt Maude’s out house was because it was a two-seater while theirs had only one. After Donald left home and married, and anytime he and his wife came home for a visit, the fact that the out house got an extra good cleaning, didn’t impress his wife in the least . In fact, she insisted that Donald drive her over to Carey Gore’s service station each time she needed to use the bathroom.

After having four girls in a row, the very first boy, Donald Roy, was born while his father was serving in World War II. Jewell was expecting Donald when Roy was called into service, and it wasn’t until Donald was eight or nine months old that he and his father saw each other for the first time. The day their dad arrived home after being discharged, the girls couldn’t wait for their dad to see his first born son.